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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Alan L. Hoffman, Pete Gurevich, Jim Grossnickle, John T. Slough
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 36 | Number 2 | September 1999 | Pages 109-125
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST99-A96
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Compact toroids can be used for fueling other fusion devices by accelerating them to high enough velocities to penetrate strong magnetic fields. In the simplest analysis, the kinetic energy density of a flux-excluding object 1/2v2 must exceed the magnetic field energy density B2/20 of the field to be pushed aside. Field reversed configurations (FRCs) are a type of compact toroid that are particularly efficient for this application due to their high density and thus lower required energy per unit mass. FRCs are also formed and accelerated inductively, thus minimizing possible impurity contamination. The Tokamak Refueling by Accelerated Plasmoids (TRAP) experiment was built to develop the inductive acceleration method and test the ability of high-velocity FRCs to penetrate transverse magnetic fields. Simple models have been developed for both the acceleration and penetration processes to determine fueler parameters required for a given tokamak field. Experimental results are given for the acceleration process. Half-milligram FRCs with number densities of 1022 m-3 were accelerated to velocities of 200 km/s, sufficient to fuel tokamaks with Tesla magnetic fields. The technology is easily extendable to much higher FRC densities and velocities, sufficient to fuel the largest, highest-field tokamaks.